You make it sound like the day the official support for Windows 7 stops the OS itself will just grind to a screeching halt, which of course is not the case. I myself will continue to use Windows 7 on my hardware - I just installed it on a Yoga 710 15" Kaby Lake the other day and 99.9% of the hardware is completely functional, the one aspect that doesn't is the multi-touch capability but since my Wife is going to use it in Stand-mode as her personal laptop she doesn't care about that.

Windows 7 will work fine on most anything for probably 6 more years from today, that's my guess, and as time passes I'll look into other solutions if necessary.

I don't worry so much about the BS from Intel and Microsoft nearly as much as some folks do because I know all the artificially created constraints they keep coming up with get dismissed by talented coders and hackers who just laugh and keep going.

What is funny is that W7 actually has a growing market share:) There even have been months when W10 dropped and W7 grew, haha. I'm too lazy to find the links again, did that for some bloke on reddit recently.

Support has cost and overhead attached to it. The fewer products and configurations you support, the less work you have to do. All of Microsoft's tactics for Windows 10 and EOLing older products follow the general strategy of minimizing the number of active products in the market. They are not the only company with this strategy, and are far from the most zealous about it; it makes a lot of sense from corporate point of view.

I don't think MikalE was suggesting that Microsoft should support Windows 7 until the end of time, but rather introduce another version of Windows that resembles Win 7 and that coexists with Win 10. It could be named "Windows Classic". I proposed something like this a couple years ago, after seeing so many people say they hated Win 10. This way, people who love Win 7 but hate Win 10 would have something to upgrade to, and Microsoft would lose fewer customers.

Microsoft had coexisting versions of Windows before, i.e. 3.11 and NT, 95 and NT, and ME and 2000.

We collect data from the browsers of site visitors to our exclusive on-demand network of analytics and social bookmarking products. We count sessions to our network sites, which are defined as a user active on a site with no more than a 30 minute inactive period. A user can have multiple sessions per day. The data is compiled from approximately 100 million valid sessions per month, widely distributed over thousands of websites. The information published is an aggregation of the data from this network of hosted websites. In addition, we classify 430+ referral sources identified as search engines. Aggregate traffic referrals from these engines are summarized and reported monthly. The statistics for search engines include both organic and sponsored referrals.

Not accurate at all. Nice to look at but total meaningless figures. It's just impossible to accurately measure the market shares of each operating system. Knowing that the Linux userbase is more technically skilled as the others, you safely assume that their tracking was blocked on the majority of visited websites by linux users

Not accurate at all. Nice to look at but total meaningless figures. It's just impossible to accurately measure the market shares of each operating system. Knowing that the Linux userbase is more technically skilled as the others, you safely assume that their tracking was blocked on the majority of visited websites by linux users

Not accurate at all. Nice to look at but total meaningless figures. It's just impossible to accurately measure the market shares of each operating system. Knowing that the Linux userbase is more technically skilled as the others, you safely assume that their tracking was blocked on the majority of visited websites by linux users

We were comparing Win 7 with Win 10.

same applies, people change user agents etc. their stats only come from sites having their tracking configured.

same applies, people change user agents etc. their stats only come from sites having their tracking configured.

As long as this caveat affects Win 7 and Win 10 more or less equally, it's not a major problem. I agree that, on average, Linux users are savvier than users of other operating systems, thereby skewing the data collected from Linux users. But I doubt there is a statistically significant difference between Win 7 and Win 10 users in this regard.

This study isn't that different from a poll. Granted, polls are never going to be 100% reliable, but neither are they "Not accurate at all. Nice to look at but total meaningless figures." Polls can be useful provided that the data are interpreted appropriately. Let me reiterate the reason I brought up this website: to illustrate that over the long term, Win 10 usage has been increasing, while Win 7 usage has been dropping. It's extremely unlikely that this trend in the data was caused by an increasing number of Win 7 users blocking tracking, and an increasing number of Win 10 users permitting tracking.

Most average users won't bother with, or know how to block tracking on Windows 10 anyway. Nor will they likely care or even know what it is. So there's that. As changeover to Windows 10 through the purchase of new computers occurs by the ignorant, of course stats for Win10 usage will increase by default.

same applies, people change user agents etc. their stats only come from sites having their tracking configured.

As long as this caveat affects Win 7 and Win 10 more or less equally, it's not a major problem. I agree that, on average, Linux users are savvier than users of other operating systems, thereby skewing the data collected from Linux users. But I doubt there is a statistically significant difference between Win 7 and Win 10 users in this regard.